Summertime and the drivin’ is easy? Daylight Saving Time and vehicle accidents. LEQS Paper No. 150/2019 December 2019

Although it is commonly understood that light conditions affect driving behaviour, detailed evidence is scarce especially for EU countries. In this paper we use the exogenous variation in daylight caused by Daylight Saving Time (DST) shifts to examine the role of light conditions on vehicle accidents. We use a rich dataset from Greek administrative data covering the universe of all types of recorded vehicle accidents over the period between 01 January 2006 to 32 December 2016. Relying on a regression discontinuity design we attempt to provide a casual evaluation regarding the impact of exogenous time shifts on the number of vehicle crashes. Our results are supportive of an ambient light mechanism that reduces the counts of serious vehicle accidents during the Spring transitions and increases on the count of minor ones during the Fall transition, especially during the most impacted hours within the day. We discuss the implications of our study both for the importance of light ambience conditions for car accidents and for the particular case of the adoption and preservation of DST policies

The Covid-19 pandemic in Greece

The world has entered into unprecedented and turbulent times due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Severe restricting measures have been implemented in many places worldwide; economic and social activities are shrinking and they are expected to keep doing so in the near future. However, what is of great interest at the moment, is to grasp an idea about how the pandemic unfolds around the globe and when it should be expected to "end". For this purpose, this note uses data collected from the Johns Hopkins (Center for System Science and Engineering) Github repository in order to analyse the Covid-19 trends in Greece. These data are daily updated on the reports provided by various users, therefore the results provided by this note will be regularly modified as new information arrives. This note follows closely the work released from Peracchi (2020) regarding the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, and which is available online on the Covid-19 forum of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Therefore, this note does not make any attempts to structurally model the situation, but rather aims in describing some basic aspects of the pandemic in Greece and provide some predicted end dates based on simple empirical model specifications that control for time trends and day fixed effects

The Covid-19 pandemic in Greece

The world has entered into unprecedented and turbulent times due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Severe restricting measures have been implemented in many places worldwide; economic and social activities are shrinking and they are expected to keep doing so in the near future. However, what is of great interest at the moment, is to grasp an idea about how the pandemic unfolds around the globe and when it should be expected to "end". For this purpose, this note uses data collected from the Johns Hopkins (Center for System Science and Engineering) Github repository in order to analyse the Covid-19 trends in Greece. These data are daily updated on the reports provided by various users, therefore the results provided by this note will be regularly modified as new information arrives. This note follows closely the work released from Peracchi (2020) regarding the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy, and which is available online on the Covid-19 forum of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. Therefore, this note does not make any attempts to structurally model the situation, but rather aims in describing some basic aspects of the pandemic in Greece and provide some predicted end dates based on simple empirical model specifications that control for time trends and day fixed effects

Crime and Unemployment in Greece: Evidence Before and During the Crisis

This paper explores the relationship between unemployment and crime in Greece before and during the crisis using panel data at the regional level for the period 1999-2013. The results indicate the operation of a positive relationship between specific crime categories and male unemployment only during the crisis, a weaker effect of long term unemployment only on the total criminal activity and they reveal the existence of significant dynamics

Did the economic adjustment programmes deliver wage flexibility in Greece?

After a period of sequential economic adjustment programmes, recent data show that wages remain irresponsive to local labour market conditions in Greece. Although there is evidence of a weak crosssectional wage curve, it disappears when individual fixed effects are introduced. Despite the extensive labour market reforms, more emphasis to the decentralisation of the wage setting process is needed

Crime and Unemployment in Greece: Evidence Before and During the Crisis

This paper explores the relationship between unemployment and crime in Greece before and during the crisis using panel data at the regional level for the period 1999-2013. The results indicate the operation of a positive relationship between specific crime categories and male unemployment only during the crisis, a weaker effect of long term unemployment only on the total criminal activity and they reveal the existence of significant dynamics

Large-Scale Online Semantic Indexing of Biomedical Articles via an Ensemble of Multi-Label Classification Models

Background: In this paper we present the approaches and methods employed in order to deal with a large scale multi-label semantic indexing task of biomedical papers. This work was mainly implemented within the context of the BioASQ challenge of 2014. Methods: The main contribution of this work is a multi-label ensemble method that incorporates a McNemar statistical significance test in order to validate the combination of the constituent machine learning algorithms. Some secondary contributions include a study on the temporal aspects of the BioASQ corpus (observations apply also to the BioASQ's super-set, the PubMed articles collection) and the proper adaptation of the algorithms used to deal with this challenging classification task. Results: The ensemble method we developed is compared to other approaches in experimental scenarios with subsets of the BioASQ corpus giving positive results. During the BioASQ 2014 challenge we obtained the first place during the first batch and the third in the two following batches. Our success in the BioASQ challenge proved that a fully automated machine-learning approach, which does not implement any heuristics and rule-based approaches, can be highly competitive and outperform other approaches in similar challenging contexts

Summertime and the drivin’ is easy? Daylight saving time and vehicle accidents

We investigate how exogenous variation in daylight caused by Daylight Saving Time affects road safety as measured by the count of vehicle crashes. We use administrative daily data from Greece covering the universe of all types of recorded vehicle accidents during the 2006–2016 period. Our regression discontinuity estimates support an ambient light mechanism that reduces the counts of serious vehicle accidents during the Spring transition and increases the count of minor ones during the Fall transition. The effects are driven from the hour intervals that are mostly affected from seasonal clock changes. We then discuss the potential cost implications of those seasonal transitions. In light of the talks about abolishing seasonal clock changes in the European Union (EU), our findings are policy relevant and can inform the public debate as empirical evidence for the block is scarce

The 2011 Industrial Relations Reform and Nominal Wage Adjustments in Greece

This study investigates nominal contractual base-wage adjustments in Greece associated with the 2011 industrial relations reform which re-defined the limits within which base wages could oscillate and allowed workers’ associations to negotiate for wages at the firm level. The assessment covers the period 2010–2013 and is based on information extracted from the universe of firm-level contracts signed in this period. We found that firm-level contracts increased dramatically shortly after the reform, now covering a larger pool of workers, especially in larger firms, and are associated with higher base-wage reductions in the post-reform period. At the firm level, wage reductions are higher when workers are represented by a workers’ association rather than a typical trade union. In addition, a heterogeneous effect is uncovered regarding the factors that shape base-wage adjustments (firm size, profitability, structure of bargaining body and aggregate unemployment) between new and traditional forms of workers’ representation in collective bargaining

Decentralized Bargaining and the Greek Labour Relations Reform (Law 4024/2011)

We investigate decentralized collective bargaining in Greece (2002-2016) under the industrial relations reform implemented in 2011. We match administrative data on firm-level contracts with non-participating firms to estimate determinants of decentralized bargaining before and after the reform. Decentralized bargaining increased in the post-reform period depending on firm size, industry and location. Nominal wage floors downgraded after 2011 in contacts signed by association of persons rather than trade unions. A base wage premium of 22 percent is found in favour of trade unions. Firm-level bargaining with trade unions is expected to promote decentralized bargaining with outcomes linked to firm-specific characteristics